Wastewater Testing Detecting Rise In Tulsa COVID-19 Infection Levels

A leading indicator of Covid-19 infections in Tulsa is predicting cases will increase in the coming weeks.

Scientists from the Oklahoma Water Survey at the University of Oklahoma say infection rates gleaned from testing sewage indicate infection is approaching rates last seen in January, which was the peak until now.

The system tests sewage for the virus, where it shows up before people realize they’re infected, or get sick, or seek testing.

OU pulls samples from four sewage plants in Oklahoma City and four surrounding towns. They sample three sewage plants in Tulsa, where COVID-19 levels were usually higher than Oklahoma City, but now they're about the same - and both increasing.

"In the Tulsa area right now, the values of virus in waste water are as high as they've been since we started monitoring in January," said Dr. Jason Vogel, the Director of the Water Survey. "It was going down, but now it's going up and the values are as high as they were in January."

Testing sewage for COVID-19 has proven to be an accurate gauge of infection in people, with trends in the virus showing up in toilet water a full week before it does by testing people one at the time. As fewer people seek proactive testing for COVID-19, the sewage testing is the most extensive testing in the metro areas.

"Up through about January, we were leading cases and being able to predict cases by about a week," said Vogel. "Since then, there's been a lot less testing and it's been harder to get that correlation to find that relationship between testing and what's in the wastewater because there's not a lot of testing going on."

Vogel said they are not currently analyzing the samples to determine which variant of the virus they're detecting.